Awks. It’s one thing for a government to offer a £61m off-the-books sweetener to reassure Nissan that Brexit wasn’t going to be such a big deal and it was fine for the Japanese carmaker to manufacture its new X-Trail model at its Sunderland plant.
It’s quite another for everyone to find out that the intended bung has proved completely ineffective. The Conservatives now can’t even manage a decent bribe.
It was left to the business secretary to try and explain away the bad news. Greg Clark may be one of the more decent members of the cabinet but he’s also one of the dullest.
Westminster’s very own Mogadon Man, a politician almost devoid of charisma and personality whose main skill is to be able not just to put everyone else to sleep but to nod off himself as he’s doing it. A tactic that can have its advantages on occasions like these when he would rather be as absent from his own life as possible.
The monotone became ever more deathless and soporific. The situation was very disappointing but it was important for everyone to take away the positives. Nissan had first asked for an £80m cash boost to help them develop the Sunderland plant, so the government had actually saved the country £19m by only agreeing to hand over £61m. Not that he had handed over all the £61m yet, but if Nissan were to reapply for the money he’d make sure they got it.
And, um, yes, Brexit was a bit of a worry, there was no denying that, but no existing jobs were going to be lost. Rather 741 people who were being underpaid on universal credit were going to have to starve for a bit longer. So no harm done. Would that do?
Much to Clark’s disappointment there were a considerable number of Labour MPs who were sufficiently concerned about Nissan to have remained awake during his opening statement. Rebecca Long-Bailey, shadow business secretary, replied for the opposition. What Nissan’s production move back to Japan proved was that the UK was getting squeezed out of the European market now that the EU and Japan had signed a trade deal and, unless the government could guarantee no tariffs post Brexit, then the UK car industry was heading for managed decline.
Clark stared at his notes haplessly. There was no salvation. All he had written down was a reminder to be as boring as possible. But he’d already done that and it hadn’t worked. So he started to ad lib. It was all basically Labour’s fault. If they had been a better opposition, then the EU referendum would probably have never happened, there would have been no need to bribe Nissan and the Tories wouldn’t have won the last election. It was as bonkers as that and the Commons was momentarily reduced to silence.
The Tories consistently like to brand themselves as ‘the party of business’ but there were less than 20 of the party’s backbenchers in the chamber for this setback. Well, it was all basically a problem up north and almost none of them could actually place Sunderland on a map. One of the few that was there was John Redwood, a man whose prime goal in life is never to come across a stick that he can’t find the wrong end of.
Nissan was nothing to do with Brexit, he insisted. The real issue was the EU nanny state that was preventing us from choking to death on diesel emissions. Once we had escaped the interfering hand of Brussels, Nissan would rush back to make the killer cars in the UK and everything would be fine. Clark gently pointed out that almost all the Nissan cars made in Sunderland were for the EU export market anyway.
This didn’t stop Bill Cash. Nothing much does. He’s been living in a century of his own for a while now. It was a throughly underhand thing for Nissan to have made alternative arrangements. Only a thoroughly untrustworthy country would seek to make alternative arrangements after agreeing to a deal. So the sooner the UK made alternative arrangements with the EU the better.
Labour quickly piled in, observing that the car industry urgently needed the certainty of a Brexit deal that guaranteed tariff-free access to the EU. Clark ummed and ahed. If only there was such a thing, he said, then the government would be right on it. Anna Soubry cut to the chase. There was such a thing and it was called the customs union.
Finally there was a crack in Clark’s denial. No one wanted a customs union more than him. A no-deal Brexit would be ruinous. But there were all these people in the cabinet, including the prime minister, who were bullying him into keeping quiet about it. He then fell silent. He’d said too much. And not given Nissan nearly enough.
